The Firehose #3

Welcome to The Firehose, where a guy who listens to too much music recommends the best albums he heard. You can follow me on Bluesky or RateYourMusic if you haven't already done so. Let's get to it.

The Most Important Thing

Mike Nasty - Black Planet

As I hinted at in the intro, my week was pretty dogshit. Over in the Northeast we had some pretty bonkers rain, which gave me a basement pool I had never asked for. I spent way more time than I wanted coordinating contractors to unflood the basement and dry everything out, only for it to flood a second time. All this is to say that the time I could spend with music was a bit compressed, I also tried to cram a 40-hour work week in between the cracks here and there and was way busier than I wanted to be.

How fortuitous then, that I found Mike Nasty's Black Planet via Dream Chimney. One hour of thumping bass and shimmery melody was a perfect way to spend several days trying not to lose my mind. House music (which I think this is, but I'm not betting my life on it) is a bit foreign to me; I just know when something hits right. There's a bit of an Afrofuturism vibe to the whole thing, which I'm a sucker for. The album art is ringing AI-art alarms in me, which... kinda sucks, but that's the world we live in now.

Recommendations

Dälek - Negro Necro Nekros

My main entry to all music is via punk and hardcore. That's the scene I was raised in, the musical language I think in, and those are the sensibilities my ears first bring to a record. My introduction to Dälek was through Paint it Black's life-changing (for me) 2008 record New Lexicon. A former member of Dälek, Oktopus, had taken a lot of loose studio scraps from the New Lexicon sessions and turned them into these chaotic, post-industrial interludes that were way outside anything I listened to at the time. My background in hip-hop was A Tribe Called Quest and the Wu-Tang Clan and not much else, so when I first heard some Dälek tunes way back then, it blew my mind. From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots and Endangered... are the albums I keep in my corner from the group. However, Negro Necro Nekros isn't on Spotify, which is why it took me another 16 years to check it out in earnest.

Having heard those New Lexicon interludes all those years ago, it's exactly what I want from the group: dark, chaotic, and most of all weird. Dälek doesn't really adhere to any of the hip-hop standards on this release and is completely willing to take a baseball bat to your expectations, which, as someone coming from punk, is exactly what I love.

Yard Act - Where's My Utopia?

Yard Act's prior record, The Overload, was my favorite album of 2022. I often joke that I love any of the British post-punk bands that came to prominence in the wake of Idles, and for the most part, that's true. As much as I liked The Overload, it made me spend a ton of time with Where's My Utopia, trying to parse what I liked about it and how that diverged from The Overload. I initially thought Overload was more aggressive and Utopia was more subdued, but that's not true. What Utopia is is more refined. They've shaved off the few things that didn't work from their first record, and what remains is a very tight, direct post-punk LP. I appreciate that they confront being on a major label head-on (although I somehow didn't realize The Overload was also on Island, so clearly it's not that important).

Right, so when we were done kissing
We finally formed this band
And we signed to a subsidiary of Universal, Inc.​
'Cause the water keeps on rising
And we know there's no surprising
Anyone with eyes and ears 'round here
That we're all gonna sink

There's probably a very annoying conversation about selling out that's occurring, but I'm not really interested in that. Be on a major label if you want to, put your stuff in a car commercial if you want to; being a career musician is functionally impossible. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

I was worried there was no "Tall Poppies" on their sophomore effort, then "Blackpool Illuminations" started. I think a very understandable impulse would be to try and reinvent the wheel on this record, and I'm glad they didn't. Yard Act shows a lot of growth without some giant tonal shift that alienates the listener. This is going to be one of my big records this year.

Constantines - Constantines

I first heard about Constantines via the Questionable Content comic's web forum around 2007-2008. Canadian indie rock was having a moment, and recommendations were coming out of the woodwork. I latched onto a different Canadian band, The Vermicious Knid, who never got the credit for being awesome that they deserved, but I really enjoyed Constantines' track "Time Can Be Overcome." I never really delved further, for whatever reason, but here is their first record. It's good! It reminds me more of Cursive than The Weakerthans, which is a nice curveball. I definitely want to check them out more, even if it's a decade too late.

Fosse - Ground

I first read about Fosse on Aquarium Drunkard, but much like Mike Nasty, I leaned on this during some dumb work moments this week. I'm really fascinated by modern experimental jazz. Taking old improvisational techniques and then messing with them using modern studio experimentation has produced some really cool stuff. This Fosse record took improvisational stuff and added a ton of interesting wrinkles that I keep finding more to bite into on subsequent listens. There's some jazz, IDM, and post-rock vibes here, and it's all great.

I'm excited to check out Fosse's prior record, Spelunking with Marbles in my Mouth and Fireflies in my Pocket. An album title like that is right up my alley.

I had even less time to read than I did to listen this week, but this is what stuck with me.

The Pitchfork review of Jet's Shine On dropped right when I started college. I don't remember how soon after October 2006 it got to me, but at some point in the next few months/years I do remember people saying did you see that Pitchfork review with the Monkey pissing in its mouth? One of my favorite things is internet archaeology, digging up random stuff that happened online decades ago and explaining who did what and why it happened. This was right up my alley.

I wanted to listen to the new Sarah Shook & the Disarmers LP, but that got pushed to next week. Still, I really enjoyed the piece from Paste on their album and what got them here. Enjoy!

The Ballad of Ray Suzuki: The Secret Life of Early Pitchfork and the Most Notorious Review Ever “Written” (Nate Rogers/The Ringer)

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers Reclaim a Life Through Memory on Revelations (Matt Mitchell/Paste)

Fosse::Ground (Jesse Lock/Aquarium Drunkard)

Here's a running Spotify playlist of everything I ever feature here.

Be kind to each other. Chin up, tits out, watch for the shoe.